(If you are concerned that we are turning into one of those games that
charge for everything: We're not doing that.
This isn't the beginning of a Zynga-like devolution, I promise.
I don't like games like that. There are some things I think
it makes sense for us to offer in-game, like an ad-free experience,
because that won't give anyone an unfair advantage, and we can't
offer it free to everyone. I mean, servers don't run on air. Another
possibility in the future is a larger inbox for Telegrams. But we will never sell
better stats or gameplay bonuses. That would screw things up.)

You can even gift to other nations! Just if you are feeling
generous. The store uses PayPal and Google Checkout, which accept
any credit or debit card.

I remember coding this game up and hoping one day it might
get 1,000 players. That, I figured, was the number that would make all the
time I was spending learning programming worth it. I remember weeks
of freaking out about ballooning player numbers, which hit my long-term
target on day 13 and kept doubling every day from there. I remember
being kicked out by my web host for overloading their service.
I remember mass downtime and lag and Jen being pissed at me because she
hadn't seen me all day and I was heading back to my study because every
time player numbers doubled, the site went down.

Against all odds, this site turned into something awesome. And that
happened because people
like you showed up and breathed life into it. You created nations and regions
and communities. And that's the reason why we're still here ten years later,
while plenty of other online games have disappeared.

I've tried to do my part to keep us running, but it's the
ongoing contributions of so many different people—admins,
moderators, and players—who have made it all possible.
I'm deeply grateful to all of you. Thank you.

Hello! There haven't been any news posts for a while. But there have
been changes! I've just been so busy making those changes
that I haven't had time to post about them. Either that or
lazy. It's one of those.

New forum hardware! Seriously, the forum doubles in
size like every six months. It's a beast. Things were getting pretty
slow, but a few weeks ago we completed a major move to new hardware,
and now it's super-fast again. For at least the next few weeks.

Rippling Flags! When you upload a custom image for your
nation's flag, you can check a "Ripple" box, to make it look more
like an actual rippling flag.
Unless it's very dark. It doesn't work so well on
very dark images. But everything else: beautiful! This feature uses
a template designed by
deviantArt user alxfa,
who has kindly allowed us to use it here!

Advanced Dossiers! Hardcore players who manage lists
of hundreds or thousands of nations can now
download and upload their dossiers
for offline management.

More API Shards! We have
an API. You probably didn't know that.
You probably don't even know what an API is. That is okay. You have
a life instead. But for those of us who think life is meant for
building web sites that automatically suck data from NationStates
and display it in new and innovative ways, we have an API. Which
now supports more data calls than ever!

WA Vote Percentages! When you consider a
World Assembly Resolution,
you are shown numbers on how the rest of your region
has voted. Some people argued that this would function as a kind
of peer pressure, increasing the "lemming effect" of votes. I'm
not sure if that actually happened. But you could figure it out
with the API.

Random Nations! When you create a new nation, you can
set its starting government type as "Random." There used to be a
"Psychotic" option, but that's gone, because frankly it was
too psychotic. It didn't make sense even by our standards.

Daily Update Speed Variance: The update time of regions
(i.e. the time at which votes are tallied to determine the WA Delegate)
has become a lot more predictable since we shifted to new hardware,
and this means invaders can time their attacks to within a few seconds
of perfection, making them near-impossible to stop. This isn't quite
how things are supposed to be, so the update now has inbuilt cleverness
to randomize its speed a little. There's more planned in this area,
but that's what we have for now.

We also have a few major new features that have been in the works
for a long time and are nearly ready to let loose. I can't
tell you what they are! That would spoil the surprise. But one
of them rhymes with "Bent Bitems Bolder bor Belegrams."

By the way, did you know that November 13, 2012 is our 10-year
anniversary? It totally is. Expect something for that, too.

Nations now have the ability to write their own Factbooks, which are collections
of "facts" about themselves. I put "facts" in quotation marks because
obviously they will be full of lies and distortions.

But that aside, I know this is going to be nifty, because it's an
extension of what's been happening in
the forums
for years: nations expanding on their own descriptions, often in amazing
detail. You go there, you can read about historical events and cultural landmarks
and how the current government gained power for as long as you want.

But these have never been easy for most players to find, and deserve
to be more visible. In the future, we also want to add ways to quickly
find the most well-regarded Factbooks in the world, so that good content
can be seen by more people.

Also planned are more uses for dispatches beyond Factbooks, allowing
nations to issue inflammatory statements about each other, for example.

But for now it's just Factbooks! You will find a "Factbook" link on your
own nation, in amongst "Overview," "People," "Government," and so on.
This link will also be present on other nations you view, but only
if they've written something.

A recap, for those who missed the April Fools frivolities,
and some questions answered, for those who were here.

So every
year since 2004 we've done an April Fools thing. These started
out small and quirky, but escalated over the years until I could
practically feel thunderclouds of disappointed players hovering overhead
as April drew nearer, waiting to shower me with, "Last year's was better"s.

In 2011, under this pressure, I made a last-minute decision to
do
a haxx0ring stunt,
and while this was very effective, it
scared the bejeesus out of people, and I felt bad afterward.

So this year I was looking for something a little more fun and a little less
email-generating.
Our lead moderator,
Reploid Productions,
had the idea for the IPO,
which could be a fun mini-game, where people
formed alliances to gain the most shares. Everyone would start with
1 share per million population, and could trade them as they wished.

I also gave myself some shares, as a target for people to
beat. I had no real idea how many would be a challenging but not unbeatable amount,
but guessed 25 million.

Up went
an IPO page, plus, at the last minute,
a new subforum in case people wanted
to talk about share trading. (Looking back, this is very much like how I added
the original forum to NationStates, just in case anyone wanted
to talk about their nations.) This forum
filled with thousands of posts.
With shares as currency, people hawked haiku, nations, art, dignity,
insults, influence, ad space, and more. Lotteries and
banks sprang up, as did scams, which were sometimes the same thing.
There were pyramid schemes and standover merchants and many, many beggars.
It was a spontaneous, concentrated eruption of inventiveness.
I spent a lot of the IPO days chortling
over those threads, because most of them are frickin' hilarious.

As nations pooled shares in order to reach the higher rungs
of the share leaderboard, another unexpected thing happened. The leading
nation—second
on the list, after me—stopped being a faction-based effort,
collecting shares primarily from deals and alliances, and instead
started representing practically everybody.
It was represented by
The NationStates Community,
and was genuine a community-wide movement as I've seen.

For a long time, it looked like they'd make it, but in the last hour,
it tapped out at a little under 20,000,000 shares, five million
short of the goal. The rest of the leaderboard was full of people who
had decided to hold on to their own shares, or had gone to bed.
(Because for anyone in North America, it was really late.
It was meant to finish an hour earlier, but I coded in the
wrong time zone. Sorry about that.)

At this point, the organizers of
The NationStates Community
reluctantly decided (via a vote) to transfer shares to the next-placed nation,
in order that it, at least, would beat the target. This would be
NewTexas.

Obviously, I should have just let that happen, and we all could have
learned a somewhat sour yet useful lesson about the power of holding
a non-negotiable swing vote in a high-stakes negotiation. But that seemed
like a shame, to me, given the nature of the community effort,
and how ridiculously hard the organizers had been working.
So I decided to transfer my 25M shares to the community. But only
at the last minute, as trading closed, so I also
secretly disabled the ability of "The NationStates Community" to
trade away its own shares in the meantime. This was
cheating, of course. But very fun.

Over the thirty-something hours, 37,505 nations claimed a total of
95,407,494 shares, representing 95 trillion NationStates citizens.
(It's a big world.) There were 29,448 trades, after which
14,898 nations held at least one share. The other 22,607 nations
who claimed shares had given them all away. You needed 251,781 shares to make
the Top 25 leaderboard, while 59,763 shares would have placed you
at #100, and 11,789 at #1,000. Nine hundred and fifty-nine nations finished
with exactly 1 share, for some reason.

Again, I just want to say how much fun this was. And the reason it
was fun because of how madly you embraced it,
so thank you to everyone who made it so. I've
said it a million times before, but I really am in awe of this place
sometimes. On the surface it just looks like a website.

Some people are
asking if we can make this a regular thing, and I don't
have an answer to that. There are a few reasons why this
worked for April but wouldn't be the same if done again. But I'm
going to look at how it might be possible. Because... fun.

Since NationStates successfully achieved its primary financial goal of
not sending me broke, it's time for the next step:
an IPO! All the
big gaming companies are doing it.

But unlike them, we're not just interested in making out like bandits
while crapping all over our playerbase. No, our IPO is different:
we're giving stock to you, the players!

For a limited time only, you can
claim 1 share in NationStates Corporation
Pty Ltd for every million citizens in your nation.
Also, as kind of a last-minute thing, you can trade shares with other
nations.

I have, of course,
assigned myself a sufficient number of shares to ensure that I remain
the largest shareholder. Obviously, we can't have the lunatics running
the asylyum. That would be a disaster.

Update: Two hours in and I'm close to losing my majority
holding. This isn't going well.

Update 2: Well, it happened. I no longer own a majority of
the company. Luckily, though, I'm still the largest individual shareholder,
and there is no plausible way anyone could overtake me.

Update 3: There's plenty of trading going on in the new
IPO forum.
(Note: Please ignore any threads about a revolution.)

Update 4: So it seems that some people think it's possible to overtake me as the #1 shareholder. Ha! Well I'm not worried! That would take, what, some kind of massive pooling of shares on a ludicrous scale. People trusting each other and working toward a common goal? On NationStates? Hahahaha!

Update 5: Ohhhh, now it's got a warm and fuzzy name. "The NationStates Community." How completely heart-warming. You're never going to make it, don't you realize? You only have twelve million shares with less than seven hours left! You're throwing away shares for nothing!

Update 6: Okay. Okay. Let's just take a breath. I may have been a little hasty. It's possible you could make it. But how—by giving absolute power to one nation? Is that what you want? Because you know what that smells like? Tyranny! How much do we know about this "The NationStates Community," anyway? Do we really want to take orders from a College State?

Update 7: That's it. Hoard your shares. Hoooooaaaaarrrrd them.

Update 8: And so I watched as "The NationStates Community" crept closer toward its goal of 25,000,000 shares, ever-more slowly, until it became obvious that it was destined to fall just short. I felt relief... and something else. An emotion strange and unfamiliar. Was I perhaps... moved? These disparate nations that had come together in shared puropose, discarding personal glory in order to shift the world together: had that impressed me? Did I find them... admirable?

Clarity filled me. Yes, many of those nations that donated to the cause had done so to oppose me, while many of those who held back were my greatest supporters. But this wasn't about me. Not any more. This was about NationStates.

So I have chosen to trade my own 25,000,000 shares to
The NationStates Community.
It is a privilege and an honor to be a part of this place. Thank you.

And we're on a new server! But some data is taking an awful long time to copy
across, so we're the kind of back where not everything works yet. Specifically,
what's not working is new nation creation and old nation restoration.
We should have that within the next day.

Also, not everyone's custom flag is displaying. Those have almost finished
transferring, though! Resist the temptation to change yours, and it'll be restored
shortly.

Almost
exactly three years ago, we boldly embarked on a quest to
answer the great question: if I pay for hosting myself, am I
going to go bankrupt or what?

Not yet! is the answer. We've been able to keep the game going
and support its growth, as we've added our own forum (now home
to 7 million posts and running on two servers) and nearly doubled
active player numbers.

Now it's time to upgrade the game server! Because that thing is
really struggling. There will be some game downtime over the next few
days as we do that, during which you also won't be able to
log in to the forums (although you'll still be able to browse them). Also,
we have temporarily disabled nation restoration.

For those of you who have been with us all that time: really? You
didn't... you didn't find anything better to do? Well... okay.
And thanks.